Scripture for Christ's time: reading Year B.

Giere, S.D.

By God's grace we find ourselves on the cusp of yet another new year--a new liturgical year, that is.

The Christian life is lived within Christ's time. Centered by the weekly Lord's Day, resurrection gathering, wherein we are met by the crucified and risen Christ, the whole of the year exists within the horizon of God's self-revelation in Jesus Christ. From Advent through Christ the King Sunday, the liturgical calendar makes the claim upon the individual and the cosmos that the crucified and risen Christ reigns over all time and space. All time is lived in Jesus Christ--his incarnation, life, death, and resurrection.

It is also true that Christians around the globe and across the different expressions of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church live in more than one calendar, not least of which are our civic and natural calendars. We move within the framework of our national holidays that massage our civic memories in terms of independence, the service and sacrifice of veterans, the contribution of workers. We also live within the dance of the celestial bodies, with sun, moon, and earth shaping tides and seasons and the length of days and nights. Living within multiple calendars is not to be lamented. It simply is. While these many calendars can and, in some times and places, do converge with one another, there are other times and places when they diverge and are in conflict.

The invaluable witness of the liturgical calendar is that Christ's time encompasses and in some sense orders all other measures of time.

Christian Scripture serves as both guide and companion as we move together in and through Christ's time. Scripture shapes and languages and forms our prayer, our reading, our hearing, our study, our preaching.

This issue of Currents in Theology and Mission, like most of the December issues in recent years, focuses on the texts that shape the new liturgical year. With Year B of the Revised Common Lectionary in view, the following essays accompany the church, its teachers and preachers, through Year B providing questions, ponderings, proddings, and insights for the journey.

While the moniker often ascribed to Year B is the "Year of Mark," the gospel lessons wander throughout both Mark and John, with the latter playing quite a significant role on feast days and other places where there are lacunae in Mark's telling of the Jesus story.

In a refreshing look at Mark's gospel, the Rev. Peter Heide invites readers and preachers to re-envision Mark's spartan beginning and fear-wrought ending in light of insights from genre analysis, in particular reading Mark as epic. Heide, also a poet, provides an Advent hymn text, "Stir Up," which you are invited and commended to include in your parish's Advent worship.

In the interest of encouraging homiletical engagement with Scripture outside the four evangelists, the bulk of this issue focuses on non-gospel texts that play significant roles at points during Year B.

Professor Gwen Sayler invites her readers to embrace the "apocalyptic hues in the eschatological rainbow" that forms over the final Sundays of the church year. These often misunderstood and at times misused texts are rooted in the historical contexts out of which they came. Sayler's definition of apocalyptic grounds the interpretation of these complicated and rich texts in ways that are historically conscious.

The psalms, the one consistent weekly feature of the church's Scriptural line-up, are undervalued for the church's proclamation. Dr. Donald Collett invites the Christian interpreter, and in particular the Christian preacher, to consider the Christology of Israel's psalter. Collett recognizes that the church's proclamation of Old Testament texts has "fallen on hard times" in large part because the church's and its preachers' unease with the relationship between the Old Testament and the proclamation of Jesus Christ. In response to these hard times, he invites readers to reconsider this relationship of Christ and the psalms.

While the Gospel of John serves to complement the Gospel of Mark in Year B, it is a happy synergy that the First Epistle of John is read throughout the Easter Season. Not unlike the psalter, 1 John is underplayed and under preached in many pulpits. Craig Simenson explores the communal nature of the community that produced the Johannine corpus, and encourages wrestling with the call to confession that is at the heart of 1 John.

It is a happy coincidence that the Epistle of James plays a significant role in the readings during Year B, specifically in late August and September 2015. While James is not the only portion of Scripture condescendingly ignored by Lutherans, it is no accident that many a Lutheran seminarian and pastor will know that Luther called James the "strawy epistle." Consider, then, exploring James in earnest this year. The Rev. Sunniva Gylver is a companion for this adventure. Among other things, a pastor in the Church of Norway and a personality on Norwegian national television, Gylver explores James in relation to her pastoral ministry in a multi-religious, multiethnic inner-city area of Oslo.

The final essay in the issue is the Rev. Aaron Decker's examination of the textual difficulties of 1 Samuel 10:27 within the broader hermeneutical horizon of thinking about multiple readings and multivalence. In one of the cases where a textual variant does play a supporting role in the text (by way of a footnote in the New Revised Standard Version), 1 Samuel 10:27 presents an interesting test case. Decker points out that the variant readings of this text lead to quite different narrative and theological conclusions.

I am grateful for the contributions that these authors here offer.

May they be a blessing to you and to the church as they accompany you in your reading, studying, praying, listening, and preaching throughout Christ's time.

S.D. Giere

Issue Editor